The Music of Fire, Stars, Tears and Light

“I feel so lonesome I could cry,” Angel Olsen sings at the beginning of “Hi-Five.” And sure, she sounds the part — ravaged, tense, dark, history-minded.

But she’s not settled — far from it. Lonely isn’t a way station for her; it’s home, and so she continues: “But instead I’ll pass the time/Sitting lonely with somebody lonely too/Well, there’s nothing in the world I’d rather do.”

This is the sort of satisfaction that’s all over “Burn Your Fire for No Witness” (Jagjaguwar), Ms. Olsen’s parched and striking second album, which she brought to Le Poisson Rouge on Thursday night. She is aggrieved but never livid, a cleareyed participant in love’s cruel give and take.

Ms. Olsen, from St. Louis via Chicago, has toured with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and there’s some of his wry airlessness in her music, particularly her early releases. But “Burn Your Fire” is her meatiest sound yet, indie rock that uses country as a mode of thinking but not a stylistic guide.

She’s at her best when she’s verging on severe. She has a firm voice that she uses as a switch, doling out little lashings, as on “Lights Out”: “If you don’t feel good about it then turn around/If you really mean it baby, stand your ground.” On “Dance Slow Decades,” she’s playing through pain: “I can hear you crying, and I’m crying too/the world might be lying, but so are you.”

Not all of that angst made it to the stage at this reverent show, which sometimes favored the hushed sort of quiet at the expense of the seething sort. Ms. Olsen has a spry, tensile voice that’s deeply expressive, but she only unleashed it sparingly here, as if it might crack the ceiling.

For the most part, she kept things dry, even when the songs — like the acidic “Stars” or “Windows,” with its keening plea, “Won’t you open a window sometimes? What’s so wrong with the light?” — demanded a bit of rowdiness. When she let the walls down, though, she was entrancing — the slippery semi-yodel on “Drunk and With Dreams,” and the hungry energy on “Iota.”

At the end of her set, before her encore, she excused her band members and sang a song, “White Fire,” alone. It begins with a dab of unexpected optimism: “Everything is tragic, it all just falls apart/But when I look into your eyes it pieces up my heart.” Then the clouds come:

I look for you or someone who can still remind me ofthe tight gripand the sun lickand the calm weightof all things summer.

For seven minutes this went on, full of scraping sadness and guitar hypnosis. Ms. Olsen remained resolutely bruised throughout: “Fierce and light and young/When you don’t know that you’re wrong/Or just how wrong you are.”

On record, there’s an almost nervous, tightly wound quality to this song, but here she remained calmer — her softness was severe enough.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Music of Fire, Stars, Tears and Light. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe